Browse Items (15542 total)

Challenges E. Talbot Donaldson's emendation of the Hengwrt reading "wight" (WBP 117); "wright" is acceptable Middle English syntax, makes good sense as it stands, and accords well with contemporary notions of God's perfect design of the sexual…

Frese reads water, dressing, and "suckling" imagery in Boccaccio, Petrarch, and ClT as vestiges of Dante's concern in "De vulgari eloquentia" with using "vernacular" language for "literature of lasting value."

The issues raised by the narrative style of BD, particularly in the use of its ambivalent first-person narrator, suggest Chaucer's early interest in an art that maintains a tension between convention and innovation.

Identifies lines from Machaut's "La Fonteinne Amoureuse" and from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" as direct sources of words and details in BD.

Reviews scholarship and examines the hunt in BD in the context of other portrayals of the hunt in medieval literature. Because of its portrayal of sudden and shocking death, the "ubi sunt" tradition is an appropriate context: the poem ends with the…

Argues that BD satisfies the principal features of the consolatio, while recognizing the poem's dream-vision characteristics. Examines dialogue, the frame, the role of narrator-dreamer as narrator-therapist who leads the Black Knight to Blanche--a…

BD is considerably more complex than some critics have believed: it is a "philosophical vision," not a "dream of folly" (Zimbardo); an "autobiography by dream" (Shoaf); a "literary sampler," or a "Boethian apocalypse" (Cherniss). It is not…

Cruxes in BD--how it can function both universally and individually, why it was composed some years after Blanche's death--can be better understood by placing the poem in the context of tomb sculpture. At the time Chaucer was writing,Henry Yevele…

Surveys critical assessments of the hunting episode in BD, explicates details of the episode, and reads it as a representation of worldly bliss. The episode and the allusion to the hunt near the end of the poem frame the Black Knight's account of…

BD is a rendering of the archetypal Fool (the poet) and the King (the Black Knight), wherein consolation for death is provided by the Fool, a pattern also in "Solomon and Marcolf."

Chaucer's concern is in part with forms of subjective experience, expressed in a dialectic between images and "nothing" in a series of lateral movements of the aesthetic imagination. At the end the poet converts retrospection to anticipation, as he…

The textual tradition shows that the major and perhaps sole manuscript used by Thynne lacked lines 31-96. The borrowings from the French alleged by Helen Phillips for this passage are commonplaces. No reliable evidence proves that Chaucer composed…

Earlier critics, led by Kittredge, read the poem as a consolation for John of Gaunt, embodied as the Black Knight;the dreamer is naive and childish. Recently, however, Robertson has denied the view of "courtly love" some see in the work. Instead,…

Differentiates the lover's malady in BD from the traditional love-sickness found in its analogues, identifying the malady as a form of head melancholy curable by a good night's sleep, the narrator's only physician. The comic version of the tale of…

Assesses Bo and its fifteenth-century reception in light of the "well-defined and distinctive" tradition of "academic translation," i.e., as a reflection of the late-medieval interest in semiotics and textual explication. Although Chaucer never…

Chaucer adapts the conventional dawn-song contrast between work and love as activities appropriate to day and night, respectively, in TC and the fabliaux, where "bisynesse" is used to connote lovemaking as the proper work of the night.

Examines the "Beryn"-writer's "interpretation of Chaucerian style" and narrative devices such as framing and indeterminacy.

Comparison with its sources reveals that the changes in ABC destroy the unity but not the coherence. Chaucer's version comes closer than its source to fulfilling Augustine's recommendations. SNT falls short of its sources in conveying the ethical…

Uses personal copy for close comparison with 1687 edition, and views book history as evidence of increasing inability to decode Middle English and the beginning of antiquarianism and collectable Chaucer.

TC includes references to animals through frequent analogy and extended imagery, but these are often generically inappropriate. Dreams about animals are largely unexplored. Comparison of Troilus to the horse Bayard not only emphasizes the hero's…

Includes discussion of Chaucer's works (pp. 35-45), commenting on the idealized settings found in BD, PF, and LGWP in comparison with their sources; also comments on the lack of such settings in TC and CT.

"Loy" may refer to the law (from Old French "loy"), compounding the irony of the Prioress's oath "by Seinte Loy." In "taking an oath by the Law 'per se'," she would have taken a stand against unprincipled, secular swearing.

Functioning in the tradition of "melancholia canina" treatises, Chaucer's dog in BD acts as a catalyst for the melancholy dreamer and enables him to relieve his sorrow.

Describes teaching Chaucer at Morehouse College, an HBCU institution (historically black college or university), considering topics such as canon expansion, dress codes, linguistic standards, and student identity. Includes student reactions to the…

Schaefer considers the process of vernacularization in late medieval English in comparison with other European languages, suggesting that quotations from the period about English are commonplaces rather than reflections of contemporary attitudes and…